[SOLVED]Dell Inspiron 5770 not seeing NVMe drive

Johnny_Bit · Apprentice Joined: 30 Aug 2005 Posts: 246 Location: Poland

Hi,

I wanted to update drive on my dell inspiron 5770 - i've got samsung 980 NVMe m.2 SSD. I cloned old disk to new one using clonezilla, mounted new disk into m.2 slot in the motherboard and tried booting up. That's when things got weird. Bios sees all kernels available as well as windows system. Windows boots nicely without a problem or noticing any change. All my kernels fail to boot with kernel panic - not finding the root.

I wanted to try and rescuse the situation but for some reason Gentoo Minimal install doesn't see the new NVMe drive and only alows me to mount the 2nd ssd drive.
The old original drive (a SanDisk X400) is nicely visible if i mount it and boot minimal install USB (also boots nicely to Linux no prob)

how can I make sure my kernel boots and sees the new drive?

Thanks!

EDIT: it was caused by bios having SATA mode set to RAID instead of AHCI. Old drive was AHCI anyway, new drive is real NVMe, that's why drive in RAID mode wasn't seen by linux.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Nov 12, 2022 10:27 pm Post subject:

Johnny_Bit,

I suspect NVME support is missing from your kernels.
Its been in the Gentoo live media for some time.

I have

Johnny_Bit · Apprentice Joined: 30 Aug 2005 Posts: 246 Location: Poland

I hooked up my old drive and it booted up no problem. Using usb-nvme (Realtek RTL9210 NVMe) adaptor I hooked up new drive and the system sees it without problem too.

My NVMe-related config is:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Nov 13, 2022 11:29 am Post subject:

Johnny_Bit,

Please post your

Johnny_Bit · Apprentice Joined: 30 Aug 2005 Posts: 246 Location: Poland

Hi,

Old drive booted and connected, new drive connected via USB adaptor:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Nov 13, 2022 1:45 pm Post subject:

Johnny_Bit,

I was expecting to see a Non-Volatile memory controller listed there. Its not.

NVMe cards come in two flavours. Those with a PCIe interface and those with a SATA interface.
Some cards do both and which one is used depends on the keying in the socket.

It appears that the Dell Inspiron 5770 has two M.2 slots. One for SATA and one for dual lane PCIe3

The slot/device keying won't let you fit a card into a slot where it can't possibly work.
As windows works from the Samsung 980 NVMe, so will linux.

In the Windows control panel, there is a system tab. At least, there used to be.
It will tell the Vendor and Device IDs of the hardware, just as lspci -nnk shows at the end of the first line. e.g. [8086:5914] is your 00:00.0 Host bridge ...
[8086 means Intel.

Windows will show more devices than linux.

I suspect that there will be a whole PCIe bus that Windows sees but Linux does not ... yet.
The PCIe bus number is the first pair of digits in the 00:00.0
That's bus 00.
Some buses can be hidden behind PCIe bridges.

Johnny_Bit · Apprentice Joined: 30 Aug 2005 Posts: 246 Location: Poland

Ni NeddySaegoon,

Indeed the AHCI/RAID was the cause. The system had RAID mode selected initially and due to SanDisk X400 being just a SSD with M+B key it ran in AHCI mode anyway. Samsung SSD 980 is true NVMe so just M.2 M key on it allowed system tu use it in RAID mode which made the device invisible to linux.

Now the drive is visible to linux (AHCI) however windows doesn't like it now ;(

So now all I have left to do is to make windows happy with AHCI or switch between modes depending on which OS i'd like to boot which might be suboptimal...

Thank you very much!

//EDIT

To those of you who need windows to boot like I do try this:
1. Set SATA mode back to RAID
2. Boot into windows
3. Snable safe mode: